Quotes About Introspection

until we learn to be comfortable alone—and more than that, to enjoy our own company—we are not really ready to live a bold and passionate life. And until we learn this lesson we are unconditionally unprepared to be in any kind of significant relationship with another person.

if I could flatter myself, that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.

Given a few days to contemplate it, the firing on Fort Sumter had cut through what had been a tangle of painful questions and a thicket obscuring who bore responsibility for thrusting them on the country.

The most important people in this man's life - the people who have mattered to him most - aren't my Mother or his wives or me or Anna or Allie. The people who matter most are the people in his head. That is loneliness.

I don't think -" I begin, but then I stop there. Strangely enough, this sounds like a full, declarative sentence, as if I'm standing in a bar shouting out one of my most obvious character flaws. I don't think!

That's me, giving myself a tough-love speech. I'm going to start doing that more often, I've decided. One might as well put his inner monologue to good use.

Shakespeare brings us to know ourselves. Dante, with his dissection of all others, bids us to know one another.

A man's library opens up his character to the world.

Before long, I had lost my youth and my patience for indulging others. Books were everything in life; books were better than wine.

Do not ask what brings Dante to man but what brings man to Dante-to personally enter his sphere, though it is forever severe and unforgiving.'

At some point within the first month I started talking to myself, which wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that I was also answering myself. I'd never imagined how crucial English was to my sense of a unified self—part

Richard Polly, 1942–2017 "Knowing others is Wisdom, Knowing yourself is Enlightenment." —Lao-tzu

I believe there is something else entirely going on but no single person can ever know it, so we fall in love.

When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral reasoning.

The human beings I know are mostly wonderful people, but they often fail to distinguish clearly between what they worked for and the good things that came their way. They also are not so good at seeing the difference between the character flaws of other people and bad things that happen to them.

We can never comprehend the depths of gloom of night in the light of day".

To think freely about things is also to separate ourselves from the flesh we are crammed into. To escape from that limiting cage that is our flesh, to break free of our chains and take flight into pure reason. In reason lies the natural life. That's what is at the core of freedom of thought." (66)

She tried to imagine what it would feel like to have always been alone. She decided that being alone to begin with would be easier than being left alone. Everything would be easier than that.

It is easier to study books and "objective facts" than to develop one's subjective life, senses, perceptive abilities, and method of thinking.

It is the only thing we can do. … Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate added to this world makes it still more inhospitable. — ETTY HILLESUM29

What strange hesitancy, fear, or apathy stops us from looking within ourselves, from trying to grasp the true essence of joy and sadness, desire and hatred? Fear of the unknown prevails, and the courage to explore that inner world fails at the frontier of our mind.

We have come to take the dysfunctional aspect of ourselves for granted without realizing that it is possible to free ourselves from the vicious circle that is exhausting us.

If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by the form of mindtraining known as meditation.

Even if we can go on deceiving others, it becomes harder to hide the truth from ourselves.